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A former telephone company employee was charged with conspiracy to commit fraud for allegedly using his access to customer account data to take on the phone numbers of 19 customers, including at least one cryptocurrency holder.
Stephen Daniel DeFiore, from Brandon, Fla., Received about $ 2,325 between October 20, 2018 and November 9, 2018 in exchange for exchanging the SIM cards of the target customers for others belonging to a co-conspirator, prosecutors said in New Orleans earlier this week. For each SIM exchange, the co-conspirator sent DeFiore the customer’s phone number, a four-digit PIN and a SIM card number to which that phone number should be exchanged, prosecutors said.
The charges come eight months after federal prosecutors accused Richard Yuan Li of Hercules, Calif., Of conspiracy to commit fraud for his alleged role in a SIM exchange coup that targeted at least twenty people. Li was in possession of an iPhone 8 to which the number of at least one of DeFiore’s victims was forwarded, prosecutors said.
The alleged victim was a New Orleans area doctor with cryptocurrency accounts on bags including Binance, Bittrex, Coinbase, Gemini, Poloniex, ItBit and Neo Wallet. Li and his co-conspirators then allegedly accessed the doctor’s email and cryptocurrency accounts and stole a “significant part” of the victim’s assets.
Prosecutors claimed that even after the doctor recovered the phone bill, Li or one of his conspirators called the doctor to say he had seen pictures on the doctor’s Gmail account and balances on the doctor’s cryptocurrency accounts. The caller then demanded 100 bitcoins, worth about $ 640,000 at the time, in exchange for not publishing the photos or stealing the cryptocurrency.
Prosecutors have not identified the phone company that DeFiore worked for, but this LinkedIn profile lists Stephen DiFiore who works as a Verizon customer service representative in Brandon, Florida. Verizon representatives did not immediately respond to an email asking for comments on this story. Attempts to reach DeFiore were unsuccessful.
This week’s accusations come as so-called SIM exchange crimes continue to proliferate, largely motivated by criminals’ attempts to get large amounts of cryptocurrency from online accounts. Once a perpetrator gains control over victims’ phone bills, the perp typically uses this access to complete account resets for email accounts and then resets passwords for other accounts.
If convicted, DeFiore faces a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of up to $ 250,000. Earlier this week, European authorities announced the arrest of 10 individuals in connection with a series of SIM exchange attacks that have yielded more than $ 100 million.